Webalizer Traffic Statistcs for your Website
To start with, avoid using a “hit counter”. Counters are misleading and don’t effectively provide enough data about your website. They can also be very dangerous if you try a “free’ one. I have seen dozens of sites infested with trojans due to free hit counters. Just forget them.
A lot of web-hosting services offer Webalizer. There may be different “server-side” statistic programs like AWStats installed as well. It is up to you what to use, or you may even have multiple tracking systems simultaneously, if your host allows. (Statistics software causes a lot of work for the server, and many hosts do not allow more than one at a time.)
Figuring out Webalizer. (This is a partial list of the most useful stats only)
Where to Find the Statistics
As you connect to Webalizer, it displays a bar-diagram of the amount of traffic, typically for a year’s time. For more information, just click on the month in the chart beneath the graph. After clicking on a given month, it displays a variety of statistical analyses of the traffic to your site. Much of the data you will not need unless you are a true guru.
Referrers: When a person clicks on a link from a different site that directs to yours, this is termed a referral. Webalizer lets you know which site was the source of the referral. In case they discovered you through a Google search, you are informed of this (you are not told what they were searching for though). Those who enroll in Google Analytics can find out what the search intent was, however it is not stored on the server. It is necessary to add a code snippet or script to every page footer that you want to monitor if you use Analytics.
Files and Hits: These statistics are the most misleading. It’s considered a “hit” every time a URL is entered. This includes when the URL is not spelled right or has expired. It’s considered a “file” when something is downloaded correctly (such as pages, images, sounds, videos, etc).
Page: Pages are “hits” for existing pages, not including pictures or flash objects that aren’t actually embedded within a page. “Page” filenames usually end in “html”, “php” or “asp”, for instance.
Visitor: Normally the IP address is used to identify a visitor. This could be misleading since if one or more visitors use the identical ISP, or are hidden behind a firewall, they might not be correctly identified. In addition, if a visitor takes too long to move from one page to the next, they may end up being counted as two separate visitors. This usually occurs at 30 minutes but may be changed by the host.
Webalizer registers “bot” activity on your website - such as Google’s “spider” Internet crawler. You can find evidence of these in the “sites” segment of the statistics. It might amaze you when you discover the amount of spiders coming to your site and the amount of bandwidth they take up in doing so. If you want to prevent undesirable bots from visiting your site, make or alter the “robots.txt” file on your computer. While the majority of spiders will heed your request, nothing legally regulates this.
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Tags: internet, Log Analysis, Site Management, software, Traffic Generation, Webalizer